Consider the moon, you say. A full moon and stars loom. All I can think of is how the ashes stuck to my nail beds for days. It rained after cremation. Pyre turning a sizzling puddle of greys and whites mimicking moon skin. Wet ash grew like gangrene on our fingers as my father and I rooted for his father’s remains.

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Consider the moon, you say. An atrophied bone jutting out of a wound in the night sky. All I can think of is how consider comes from Latin considerare, meaning to observe the stars. Is the night sky not studded with shrapnel of broken bones?

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No, to look at the moon is to turn to desire, you say. Desire, desiderare, meaning to await what the stars will bring. A star is the past burning tonight. Like a pyre, it brings death’s light.

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Seeing the night sky one comprehends beauty, you say. Comprehendere means to grasp or seize something with hands. I cannot grasp the moon. Look, how my father’s hands envelope mine. My calluses sink into his tender flesh. His flesh softens every passing minute. Yet, I comprehend the moon. Sun sets, and remembering him, moon burns. Like my father, and his father before him, I’ve begun burning.

Soumitra Somendra (he/him) is the author of the online zine The Phantom of Fast Fashion: A Flâneur’s Sketches of a City Clothed in Mass Consumerism. His poems have appeared in Gulmohur Quarterly, Prosetrics, and the zine Between What Should and Should Not Be. He is a poet from Jaipur, India.